Political Protests and Liberal Hypocrisy

The people of Egypt are protesting in the streets of Cairo, and liberals are ecstatic. They are hoping the Mubarak regime will collapse and the people of Egypt will find their political voice. “The whole world is watching” their anti-government protests. There is no place to hide from the watching eye of the new technology. Obama and company are critical of the way Mubarak turneded off the internet, and they’ve told him so. Good for them. But am I living in a dream world? So why are we still hearing calls for an Internet Kill Switch, Net Neutrality, and the regulation of talk radio?

Isn’t it interesting how much support these Egyptian “anti-government” protestors are getting from our media and some officials in the White House? The Daily Telegraph reported that “the American government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning ‘regime change’ for the past three years.” It’s all about “democracy” and “free expression.” But when ordinary citizens in the United States take to the streets in a peaceful manner to protest our nation’s policies, they were labeled “kooks,” anti-government radicals, racists, Nazis, storm troopers in Brooks Brothers’ suits. Here’s what Liberal commentator Bill Press had to say about the TEA Party movement:

Taking a page right out of a Nazi playbook, organizers bus in professional protestors and arm them with instructions on how to take over meetings, shut down discussion, shout over any pro-health care reform speakers, and then post video of the resulting chaos on YouTube. It’s mob rule, pure and simple.

Having encouraged viewers to show up, sympathetic anchors on Fox News then pretend these are “grassroots” protests springing up spontaneously across the country in opposition to President Obama’s plans for health care reform. Nonsense. There’s nothing spontaneous about them. They’re not grassroots protests; they’re “Astroturf” protests. Just look at who’s paying the freight, who shows up and what orders they’re given.

At least the ADL took exception to the stupidity of Press’ comments, only because he made the moral equivalency argument by using the Nazi comparison. There was even an anti-TEA Party movement called “Crash the Tea Party.” Then there was the Patriot Majority PAC that was working to defeat Tea Party candidates. Patriot Majority was involved in “putting together a tracking program of Tea Party activity nationwide to monitor outbreaks of actual violence, threats of violence or other types of extremism.” Of course, there weren’t any to report, but this hasn’t stopped Liberals from continuing to make the claim.

The TEA Party movement has been very upsetting to Liberals and any number of RINOs and establishment Republicans. The last gasp of the so-called Progressive movement was to pin the Tucson shooting on the nascent conservative revival. There’s a reason why this guilt by association tactic didn’t work, even though nearly every media outlet tried to cement the relationship as Bryon York shows:

Hate groups do exist across the political spectrum, and have for a long time. But they have nothing to do with the expressions of frustration over deficits, taxes and Obamacare that we have heard at so many Tea Party gatherings. That frustration, felt by Republicans, independents and even some Democrats, is an entirely mainstream reaction to the sharply activist course the president and congressional leadership have taken. While the level of frustration is indeed a threat, it is a political threat.

So then, riots, fires, and deaths in the streets are OK to bring down a dictator like Mubarak, but peaceful demonstrations to protest a specific set of policy demands by a sitting government in the United States is a prelude to moral and political anarchy even though the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that “the people” have the “right” peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Why is it OK for Hillary Clinton to say the Egyptians only “want their grievances to be addressed,”1 but for citizens of the United States such peaceful demonstrations to air their grievances are anti-government and dangerous to our Republic?

The opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, mostly penned by the patron-saint of the political Left, Thomas Jefferson, is even more politically revolutionary than the words found in the First Amendment:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It’s not hard to explain what’s going on. Civil rulers see themselves as gods. They believe they have the near supernatural ability to know how to spend money and use power better than 300 million people who make billions of power-related and economic decisions daily. The consequences of their laws have wide-ranging consequences that they care little about. How a business on Main Street is affected does not bother them in the least.

Those opposed to the governmental policies of this administration and past ones are doing the throwing off constitutionally. In the 2010 national election, the dissolving of the political bands came by way of the ballot box, not the firebox. One would think that Liberals would note the difference. They won’t. Rush Limbaugh made the following observation: “The Democrats and the media seem to be more embracing of the Muslim Brotherhood than the Tea Party movement, have you noticed that? I have.” Liberal hypocrisy runs deep.

In an interview broadcast on FOX News, Hillary Clinton made the following comment about the Cairo protests: “They want their grievances to be addressed.” [↩]

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